It also asked the government on Tuesday to pass the anti-communal violence law besides release of innocent Muslim youth arrested on false charges of involvement in terrorist activities. It said if its demands were not met, it would launch nationwide protests.

Taking on UPA chairperson and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Jamiat general secretary Maulana Mahmood Madani said, "You can't remain competent and eligible to the legacy of the great family if injustices in the states run by your party are not stopped, and communal violence law is not enacted during the UPA regime."

He claimed Muslims were not "bonded labour" of any particular party and urged the government to at least introduce the communal violence bill in Congress-ruled states within a year.

The Jamiat leader said all political parties had fooled the minorities and other weaker sections including Muslims, OBCs and tribals. Madani also urged the BJP to clarify its stand on Muslims. "If it clarifies its stand, the country's destiny will definitely change," he said referring to the recent claim of BJP leader L K Advani that the attitude of Muslims towards the party was changing.

He also took on Mulayam Singh Yadav and said if the Samajwadi Party chief failed to fulfill his commitment of providing 18% reservation to Muslims, releasing Muslim youth arrested on false charges and allowing reconstruction and repair of mosques in Uttar Pradesh, his dream of becoming prime minister would remain unfulfilled.

Around 12,000 protesters courted arrest near Ram Manohar Lohia hospital in the capital, and Jamiat leaders submitted a memorandum of demands to the prime minister's office.

"Our working committee will meet next month. We will give the government a couple of months to act. If it fails, there will be nation-wide protest including massive jail bharo movement," Madani said.

It will not be interesting times ahead but will be touch times for the future governments. Government should allocate quotes if & only if these people abide to 2 child policy( it might be for any religion for that matter).

Personally, I think this quota system has ruined the spine of India to DIY and instead move around moping with the beggars' bowl!

Further, it also shows that these quota and populist freebies are bogus and crooked. I believe, if the news is to be believed, the CAG has exposed that the susbsidy to the farmers have gone to the wrong people and there has been a huge pilferage and incorrect procedures. .

Gujjar reservation issue was created by upper caste party BJP (? intentionally) by promising reservations during election campaign. Typical Brahminical kuteel neeti.
Jaats in Haryana are land owning dominant caste. They are behaving as a dominant caste should behave according to holy caste system.

Mobilising on the basis of their caste identities, Dalits and Other Backward Castes (OBCs) have been able to wrest substantial rights for themselves over the decades. Although the less numerous and less powerful castes among the OBCs and the Dalits remain heavily marginalized in terms of all developmental indices,

it cannot be denied that reservations in public sector employment and educational institutions and other positive discrimination measures undertaken by the state for these communities has played a central role in their overall development and empowerment. In this process, of course, the role of caste-based movements of reform and protest remains central, in the absence of which the state might never have been forced to concede to affirmative measures to address their concerns in the first place.

The vast majorityâ€”some estimates put the figure at more than eighty per centâ€”of the Indian Muslims belong to various caste groups that were, and still are, considered â€˜lowâ€™ in the caste hierarchy. These groups are of indigenous origin that, over time, underwent a process of Islamisation, a process that is still under way in different forms. On the other hand are Muslims who are, or claim to be, of â€˜foreignâ€™ extraction, in which, typically, they take great pride. These are the Syeds and Shaikhs, who claim Arab origin, and the Mughals and Pathans, who claim Turkic and Afghan descent respectively. In the centuries of â€˜Muslimâ€™ rule in India, these Muslims of â€˜foreign extractionâ€™, who also claim to be ashraf or â€˜nobleâ€™ (as distinct from the majority Indian Muslims of indigenous, â€˜lowâ€™ caste extraction whom they looked down upon) occupied key positions in society as rulers, landlords, and religious scholars (â€˜ulema). This pattern continues till today, with most top Muslim politicians and ulema belonging to the same ashraf class.

One of the reasons for the overall â€˜backwardnessâ€™ of the Indian Muslims is undoubtedly the fact that the vast majority of the community are of â€˜lowâ€™ caste origin, having remained deprived and marginalized precisely because of their caste origins and background and despite their conversion to Islam. Further, in contrast to â€˜Hinduâ€™ Dalits, who have won crucial gains by mobilizing on the basis of caste, the Muslim â€˜lowâ€™ castes have witnessed no such substantial caste-based mobilization for their rights despite the fact that their social, economic, and educational conditions are at par, or perhaps even more dismal, than the former.

That such caste-based mobilization for rights and for making demands on the state have been relatively absent in the â€˜lowerâ€™ caste Muslim case owes principally to the continuing hegemony of the ashraf Muslims, who project themselves as the natural leaders and spokesmen of all Muslims and, as maulvis, as the authoritative spokesmen of Islam. While, in general, the ashraf continue to strictly practice endogamy (thus perpetuating their castes) and many ashraf maulvis continue to seek to sanction caste hierarchy in the name of kufu (social, including caste, parity while choosing marital partners), in the face of demands by â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslim groups for reservations for them in public sector employment and educational institutions, as is available for non-Muslim Dalits, the ashraf have cried foul, claiming that such demands are â€˜un-Islamicâ€™ because caste itself, they argue, is an un-Islamic or Hindu institution or notion.

Typically, they have angrily decried demands for affirmative action for â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslims as â€˜divisiveâ€™, and even as a â€˜conspiracy to destroy Muslim unityâ€™ or even to â€˜Hinduise the Indian Muslimsâ€™ at the same time as they make no effort to promote meaningful Muslim unity by, for instance, denouncing caste endogamy among the ashraf, making Muslim organizations more socially inclusive by incorporating more non-ashraf in decision making positions, or critiquing the divisive sectarianism of the mullahs, which takes the form of angry polemics between rival Islamic sects, each of which claims to alone represent Islamic authenticity. Behind such appeals of ashraf leaders to promote â€˜Muslim unityâ€™ in the face of â€˜lowâ€™ caste demands for state-sponsored affirmative action, which they denounce as â€˜divisiveâ€™ and â€˜un-Islamicâ€™, one can detect a distinct nervousness at the prospect of the numerically much more significant non-ashraf threatening their claims to leading and representing the entire Muslim community.

In the face of growing demands on the part of â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslims for reservations, ashraf leaders have typically responded by arguing, against obvious empirical reality, that Muslims have no caste at all, this being a â€˜Hinduâ€™ institution, and that their identity is, or should be, defined simply by Islam alone. If pressed to reluctantly recognize the existence of caste among the Indian Muslims, an undeniable social reality, they would argue that the state should consider all of Indiaâ€™s Muslims, as an entire community, as socially and economically â€˜backwardâ€™ for purposes of reservation, rather than limiting this category only to the â€˜lowâ€™ castes among them. â€˜Lowâ€™ caste Muslim ideologues have pointed out that in this way ashraf leaders seek to scuttle any prospects for positive discrimination in favour of the â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslims as well as to ensure that the benefits of such a policy, if adopted, accrue largely or entirely to the ashraf, who, though in a minority compared to the â€˜lowâ€™ castes, are educationally, socially and economically far in advance of them.

The continuing tension between ashraf spokesmen and â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslim leaders on the issue of caste-based reservations for Muslims is well illustrated by a letter penned by Maulvi Anis ur-Rahman Qasmi, the General Secretary of the Imarat-e Shariah of Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand, addressed to Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister of Bihar, which I came across recently. The Imarat-e Shariah is a body of Deobandi clerics who claim to represent the Muslims of three eastern Indian states and to be authoritative interpreters of Islam.

In his letter, Maulvi Qasmi congratulated the Bihar Chief Minister for having included the Malik caste of Muslims as OBCs (although the Maliks claim to be â€˜highâ€™ in the social hierarchy) and appealed to him to include what he termed â€˜the remaining three [Muslim] castes (jatiyan)â€™ in the state that were not already categorized as such in the OBC list, a reference to the socially dominant Syeds, Pathans and Shaikhs. It is said that the letter provoked a storm of protest from â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslim leaders in Bihar, as well as non-Muslim OBC organizations, who saw it as a conspiracy to grab the limited gains that the OBCs, including the Muslim OBCs, had been able to wrest from the state. They pointed out the anomaly, or hypocrisy, as some put it, of Maulvi Qasmi recognizing the existence of caste among Muslims (by pleading the case for reservations to be extended to the three ashraf castes) while at the same time ashraf mullahs and other leaders of Maulvi Qasmiâ€™s kind are quick to deny the existence of caste among Muslims when demands for affirmative action for â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslims are made, whether on the state or on ashraf-led Muslim organizations.

Maulvi Qasmi is, of course, no exception, and he merely exemplifies the muddled, contradictory and self-serving stances of most ashraf leaders with regard to the issue of affirmative action for Muslims. It is clear that, generally speaking, these leaders remain vehemently opposed to any independent mobilization of â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslims, even if for the purposes of making demands on the state. That opposition continues to pose a major hurdle on the ability of â€˜lowâ€™ caste Muslims to mobilize for their rights and to work for their own empowerment and a cause, among many, for their continued marginalization.

He also took on Mulayam Singh Yadav and said if the Samajwadi Party chief failed to fulfill his commitment of providing 18% reservation to Muslims, releasing Muslim youth arrested on false charges and allowing reconstruction and repair of mosques in Uttar Pradesh, his dream of becoming prime minister would remain unfulfilled.

Click to expand...

Give them quotas,repair their place of worship,subsidise their pilgrimage, don't enact tough terror laws basically let's become another Pakistan.

Apart from this widespread feeling of humiliation faced by pasmanda muslims the ashraf Muslims have cornered all the share of pasmanda muslims in the name of minority politics. Although pasmanda muslims constitute about 85% of Indian Muslim population but as far as their share in power is concernedâ€”whether it is judiciary, executive and the legislature, or the community institutions run in the name of Muslimsâ€”it is almost negligible. In striking contrast, the ashraf Muslims, who constitute merely 15% of Muslim population, are able to secure adequate representation for themselves. Even in sectors like education, health, employment, etc., the condition of ashrafs is far better than the pasmanda muslims.

Similarly, if we take the case of political representation, then out of 7,500 members from the first to fourteenth Lok Sabha (lower house of the Parliament) only about 400 members belonged to the Muslim community. Out of these 400 Muslim members about 340 have been ashraf Muslims and only 60 have belonged to the pasmanda community. If the population of Muslims in India is 13.4% (Census 2001) then the population of ashraf Muslims is about 2.1% (15% of Muslim population) and the population of pasmanda muslims turns out to be 11.4% (85% of Muslim population). Hence, the representation of ashraf Muslims in Lok Sabha works out to be 4.5% that is way beyond their population percentage of 2.1%. Even here they are not only adequately represented but rather are doubly represented. On the contrary the representation of pasmanda muslims with a population of 11.4% has been about 0.8% (less than 1 percent) in Lok Sabha. It is quite clear which section of Muslims is benefitting from Muslim/Minority politics!!!

It can be stated reasonably that the savarna section of Muslims is not a deprived group but rather is a powerful group which serves its interests at the expense of the pasmanda sections

Click to expand...

Already many backward Muslims get reservations, not as separate religious category but as part of OBC category. Upper caste Muslims are well off. Obviously in guise of religion based reservations they will corner even more jobs. They have done it before, they got a resource rich chunk of India as separate country. Jinnah, Iqbal, Sir Syed all these ideological fathers of Pakistan are upper caste Ashrafs. The feudal lords and Generals of Pakistan who hold all power and wealth are also upper castes.

So you are for Muslim reservations or against muslim reservations.Ian not for reservation for Abrahamic religions.May I know what you think

Click to expand...

Policies of a secular state should not be based on religion. So any jobs/ political positions should not be reserved for any particular religion.

In case of Muslims, land and resources were given to them (especially upper caste Muslims. that too more than what was their percentage at time of partition. even then lot of Muslims stayed in India (which is commendable. nice thing) so ideally India should take back at least one third land and rivers from Pakistan.

Caste based reservations is a different thing. For lower castes among Muslims and Christians to be eligible for applying for reserved seats on basis of caste, ideally, first it should be accepted and officially declared that Islam and Christianity follow caste system. The top clergy of Saudi Arabia/iran/iraq and all the popes etc should officially declare that their religions follow caste system. or else, people should leave these religions. but maybe inclusion of few very backward castes among Indian Muslims within the existing quota may be tolerated, though it is morally wrong.